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Shame, Guilt, and Pathological Guilt:
A Discussion of Bernard Williams
MICHAEL STOCKER
Shame and Necessity
1
continues Bernard Williams’ trenchant critique of
Morality, Our Peculiar Institution.
2
One of its main themes is that our ethi-
cal theories overemphasize guilt and, concomitantly, underemphasize, even
ignore, shame. They, thus, make serious theoretical and ethical errors: they
misunderstand themselves, misunderstanding even their central notion,
guilt; and they encourage us to misunderstand ourselves and our relations
with others. Three quotes from chapter four, “Shame and Autonomy,”
which focuses on these errors, give a good indication of those claims:
[Guilt] can direct one towards those who have been wronged or damaged,
and demand reparations in the name, simply, of what has happened to them.
But it cannot by itself help one to understand one’s relations to those hap-
penings, or to rebuild the self that has done these things and the world
in which one has to live. Only shame can do that, because it embodies
conceptions of what one is and how one is related to others.
3
Shame can understand guilt, but guilt cannot understand itself.
4
The conceptions of modern morality ...insist at once on the primacy of
guilt, its significance in turning us towards victims, and its rational restric-
tion to the voluntary . . . if we want to understand why it might be important
for us to distinguish the harms we do voluntarily from those we do invol-

also ignore other questions raised by those quotes, such as whether Williams
intends to restrict guilt to wrongs or damages to a person, instead of also
allowing, as I would, that damage to a work of art, say, can be sufficient;
and whether he holds, as I would – and as he may be taken to suggest by
“wronged or damaged” – that guilt goes beyond the realm of morality, to
“merely” evaluative harms and damages.
In the first section,Iargue that inadequate attention to shame and
an overemphasis on guilt are connected with mistaken, problematic, or
pathological forms of guilt and that adequate guilt understood adequately
is deeply involved with shame. The next sections explore some other
ways shame is evaluatively important. The final section criticizes the ways
Williams and others characterize and distinguish between shame and guilt.
1. GUILT WITHOUT SHAME: PATHOLOGIES AND MISTAKES
To show how guilt – adequate guilt, adequately understood – requires
shame, let us focus on guilt over a particular act, schematized by “I feel
guilt (or guilty) over doing act b,” and on shame over the same particular
act, schematized by “I feel ashamed of myself for doing act b.” It will help to
think of the shame here as well-contained shame of healthy, mature adults
of adequate ego strength. (On this, see the discussion of one’s whole being
in the final section.)
By focusing on these cases, I am ignoring or postponing discussion of
various important issues. Guilt need not be restricted to acts. I can feel
guilt over wishes to act and over “mere” thoughts, such as unkind or unjust
thoughts as in “I feel guilty that I thought that you were the thief.” So too,
there is survivor’s guilt and guilt over states of being, for example, being so
rich when others are so poor.
Further, shame need not be well contained. It can be of the whole self,
seeing the whole self as through and through bad. (Again, see the discussion
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Williams does not go as far as this. He holds only that guilt is primarily of
acts: “What I have done points in one direction towards what has happened
to others [i.e., the province of guilt], in another direction to what I am.
Guilt looks primarily in the first direction.”
7
My discussion will also be a
discussion of his more moderate claim.
To examine the claim that guilt is of acts and shame of agents – and that
this enters into the characterization and differentiation of shame and guilt –
let us ask what can be shown by a person’s feeling guilt, but no shame.
6
This can be seen as an instance of the common, contemporary ethical view that there are no
important conceptual connections between agent evaluations and act evaluations. In what
follows, this view is rejected, as it is in Stocker (1973) and in Hegeman and Stocker (1996).
7
Williams, (1993), p. 92.
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Michael Stocker
At times, little if anything problematic is shown. Borrowing from legal
theory, we could here consider some malum prohibita cases, where an act is
wrong because it is prohibited, especially many cases of administrative or
technical wrongs, and many cases of strict liability. In many of these cases,
feeling no shame may be consistent with feeling all a person should feel: the
person need only acknowledge guilt, not feel guilty. In fact, to feel shame
in these cases could, itself, indicate problems.
But sometimes guilt without shame can show that the person does not
understand what guilt is, or that the person really does not feel guilty, or that
the felt guilt is only partial or inadequate. For example, if a person pleads

views about the self may be in play to account for this extraordinary claim.
8
Coetzee, (2000), p. 54.
9
For psychoanalytically-informed discussion of dissociation, see Bromberg (1998).
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Shame, Guilt, and Pathological Guilt
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Explanations of how one can feel guilt without feeling shame involve
different mixes of dissociation; of failures of integration of various parts
and aspects of one’s life; of failures to recognize and acknowledge agency; of
failures to draw even simple moral conclusions; of strange, perhaps perverse,
misunderstandings of what makes for a good or bad person; of a lack of
concern with one’s person or character.
Shame without guilt also deserves attention. But here I will only regis-
ter a claim and ask a question. The claim is that it, too, can show mistakes
and pathologies. In many cases of shame without guilt – and also of being
ashamed of oneself without being ashamed of what one does – the person
focuses excessively on himself and inadequately on (to use Williams’ char-
acterization of duty) what is done and on those “who have been wronged or
damaged” and the “demand [for] reparations in the name, simply, of what
has happened to them.”
10
The question is that if shame without guilt is problematic, what con-
ditions would have to be met – and has any culture met them, could any
culture meet them – for a culture to be so exclusively a shame culture that
guilt plays no, or only the smallest, role in it? This raises an issue for claims,
made by Williams and others, that classical Greeks did not think of them-
selves in terms of, as subject to, guilt and that they did not have our, or even

including guilt without shame whether with or without pathologies and
mistakes. We might think of this as a dispute between, on one side, those
Aristotelians and others who look to what is true of good instances and
deviations from this as the basis for characterizing all instances, and, on
another side, those given to a certain sort of austere conceptual analysis,
who look to what is common to all instances for this characterization.
Another issue is what we are now to make of the claim that guilt is of acts,
not people, and the subsequent claim that this can be used to distinguish
between guilt and shame. For if what I have just said is right, in many cases
guilt is of both acts and agents. And of course, in many cases, shame is of
both agents and acts. If there is a difference between guilt and shame or
between what guilt and shame are of, the act/agent distinction fails to give
it. (Other attempted characterizations and differentiations are considered
and rejected in the final section of this work.)
2. SELF-REGARDING AND INDECOROUS SHAME
We have already made a start on showing how widely shame ranges by
showing some of its roles in guilt. To get a better understanding of its
range, and how in other ways it can aid understanding and rebuilding the
self – and how any adequate ethics must go beyond guilt, even guilt with
shame – we must add the several sorts of shame without guilt discussed
in the next sections: self-regarding and indecorous shame, identificatory
shame, and shame without responsibility.
Acts we consider wrong and warranting guilt are typically not self-
regarding. We need to tell a special story to make sense of such claims as
“I wronged myself” or “Because of the way I harmed myself, I acted in a
morally wrong way,” and correlatively, in regard to these acts, “I feel guilty
for doing that.” Shame, however, is not so restricted. I can feel shame over
both how I harmed you and how I harmed myself. So for example, I can
feel guilty about short-changing you in your education. But again absent a
special story, I cannot be guilty of short changing myself in my education.

inhabitants of these lands; the shame I feel over the boorish behavior on
the streets of Paris by someone I know only as a fellow American.
We can understand my shame in these cases even if the shame is in no
way of me. To be sure, it is important, indeed vital, that I somehow identify
with what I am here ashamed of. But there is no difficulty in this: They
are my great grandparents; I am an American citizen; I lived in Australia
and considered it my home for close to two decades. Those relations help
make up my world. A world lacking such identifications would, indeed, be
unfriendly.
13
The need for identifications for such shame helps explain why I am
not – and perhaps why I cannot be – ashamed of, say, what your great
grandparents did, or what the Spanish did to the original inhabitants of the
lands they colonized, or the boorish behavior in New York of a Frenchman
Idonot know. To be sure, were I to think of them and myself as, say,
12
My thanks are owed to Harold Skulsky for help with the material in this paragraph.
13
As Aristotle, discussing a somewhat similar issue in the Nicomachean Ethics, I.ll, said,
it would be an unfriendly doctrine to deny that one’s descendants and friends can affect
one’s own happiness, even after one’s death. See, too, his comments on external goods in
NE, I.8.
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Michael Stocker
coreligionists or white people, I could feel ashamed of them. But that just
makes my point. Identification is needed for such shame.
We can take these cases to show that my identity is more diffuse and
is located in other places and times than is my self. As it might be put, I

omission of mine.
But perhaps identificatory guilt or some other guilt without culpability
is possible. After all, agent regret involves a sort of felt responsibility without
culpability.
14
To be sure, agent regret seems to require some sort or amount
14
See, e.g., Williams (1981). See also Williams (1995) reprinted from Statman, (1993).